KARCHER STAFF BLOG

Karcher 2017-2018 School Calendar

Students of the week!!!!!!!
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This week's article...

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Continuation from last week's article... please discuss in team time.

Formative Assessment Action Plan

by Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher

Chapter 1. Creating a Formative Assessment System

The Gradual Release of Responsibility Framework

A formative assessment system is only as good as the instructional framework on which it rests. No formative assessment system can compensate for poor instruction. Neither does simply having an instructional framework ensure that students will learn; both a framework and a system are required. The instructional framework we recommend is based on a gradual release of responsibility from teachers to students (Fisher & Frey, 2008a; Pearson & Gallagher, 1983) and includes five distinct components (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2. Gradual Release of Responsibility

Source: From Better learning through structured teaching: A framework for the gradual release of responsibility (p. 4), by D. Fisher and N. Frey, 2008, Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Copyright 2008 by ASCD. Reprinted with permission.

Focus Lesson (I do it) Establishing Purpose

Every lesson must have an established purpose. This purpose can be in the form of a goal or objective, provided that the students know what that goal or objective is. The established purpose can have different components, such as content versus language (which will be more fully addressed in Chapter 2). Establishing purpose is important for many reasons, including alerting students to important information and keeping the teacher from getting off topic by discussing tangential information. In a formative assessment system, the purpose drives both feedback and feed-forward. Most people agree that it's not fair to assess or test students on things that haven't been taught. Sometimes students don't get the purpose of the lesson, and, in those cases, it's not fair to assess students on things that haven't been clearly established as important.

Consider these two examples. In one classroom, the teacher has students working on projects, but they don't know why or what is expected of them. There is no learning goal or purpose. In this class, the feedback students receive may be meaningless. In another classroom, the teacher has students working on projects with a clearly communicated purpose: to understand how sonar is used to determine water depths. When the teacher checks for understanding, the feedback is aligned with this purpose and the teacher can provide additional instruction to students who make errors, feeding forward until they understand the content.

Focus Lesson (I do it) Teacher Modeling

School is more than a pile of discrete facts that students have to memorize; it's about thinking, questioning, and reflecting. As apprentices, students need examples of the kinds of thinking that experts do in order to begin to approximate those habits of mind. Thinking is a complex cognitive process that is largely invisible. To make it visible, teachers model through a think-aloud in which they "open up their minds" and let students see how they go about solving the various problems of school, from quadratic equations to decoding a word. As Gerald Duffy points out, "The only way to model thinking is to talk about how to do it. That is, we provide a verbal description of the thinking one does or, more accurately, an approximation of the thinking involved" (2003, p. 11).

In a formative assessment system, teacher modeling serves to highlight the processes that students should use to complete tasks and assignments. It's less about the specific content and more about the ways in which experts in different disciplines go about their work. As we will explore in greater detail, formative assessment systems require attention to more than the correct response. Feedback and feed-forward also focus on the processes that students use as learners and thinkers, as well as their self-regulation and self-monitoring. Teacher modeling, through think-alouds, can provide students with examples of "self-generated thoughts, feelings, and actions that are planned and cyclically adapted to the attainment of personal goals" (Zimmerman, 2000, p. 14) such that students are responding to the feedback and future instruction they receive about learning.

Guided Instruction (We do it)

In each lesson, the teacher must guide students toward increased understanding. This happens through the systematic use of questions, prompts, and cues. In this phase, questions are used to check for understanding. When a student's response indicates a misconception or an error, the teacher prompts the student. Prompts are cognitive or metacognitive and focus on getting the learner to think. If prompts fail to resolve the misconception or error, the teacher provides a cue. Cues shift the learner's attention to a resource that may help. As we will see in greater detail in Chapter 5, guided instruction is difficult to do in a whole-class format and works better in addressing the needs individual students present as they learn.

In a formative assessment system, guided instruction is an opportune time to provide students with feedback while also providing additional instruction. In this way, guided instruction plays a pivotal role in a formative assessment system as teachers feed-forward instruction based on real-time student responses. Consider the following exchange between a teacher and a small group of students having difficulty with the concept of writing mathematical sentences as inequalities.

Teacher: Tell me more about your answer. Read to me what you've written.

Alexis: The sentence says "Twenty minus the product of four and a number x is less than four." [20 - 4x < 4]

Teacher: Yes, it does. So what did your group write on the chart paper?

Brandon: Right here. [points]

Teacher: Can you read that to me? Not from the projector but from your chart paper?

Justin: We wrote twenty minus four plus x is less than four. [20 - 4 + x < 4]

Teacher: Did that sound the same as when Alexis read it?

All: Yeah?

Teacher: Think about the word product.

Alexis: That's to multiply.

Justin: But we didn't multiply.

Brandon: Where do we multiply?

Alexis: Maybe right here? [points to the minus sign]

Teacher: Be careful. You might want to read it again.

Alexis: Twenty minus the product of four and a number x is less than four. Oh, wait, first we have to write 20 and then minus.

Justin: Then it says product, so we have to multiply. But you can't have multiply next to minus.

Teacher: [Cups her hands around the words "the product of four and a number x."]

Brandon: Wait. Look. It's 4x, not minus four plus x.

Alexis: Oh, it's 20 - 4x < 4. That's right, huh?

Justin: It is, now read it again. It's just like the sentence up there. [points to projected problem set]

This brief exchange allows the teacher to prompt and cue such that students experience success and complete the task. Will they need additional instruction? Probably. That's what formative assessment systems are all about: reducing discrepancies between current understandings and a desired goal (Hattie, 2009). Feedback alone would probably not have resulted in new understanding.

Productive Group Work (You do it together)

Though students stand to learn a lot from and with their teachers, they are unlikely to consolidate that understanding unless they also work alongside peers in creating and producing something. Importantly, creating is now considered the highest-order thinking task in the Bloom's taxonomy revised for the 21st century (see Figure 1.3). Creating something requires that students use their prior knowledge in new ways and that they rally resources to complete the task. As Matthew Crawford argues in Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), thinking should not be separated from doing. It is the doing that solidifies understanding. Of course, educators have known this for a long time, but group work got a bad reputation because we have all experienced bad examples of this good idea. How many times have we been assigned to a group, just to do all of the work and watch others share the credit for it? That's not the productive group work we're talking about, nor is it the cooperative learning that David Johnson and Roger Johnson (1999) envisioned. The key to productive group work is individual accountability. Each member of the group must produce something based on the group's interaction. It is when students work alongside their peers that they interact, using academic language and argumentation skills.

Figure 1.3. Bloom's Taxonomy in the 21st Century

Source: From Guided instruction. How to develop confident and successful learners (p. 11), by D. Fisher and N. Frey, 2010, Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Copyright 2010 by ASCD. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 1.4 contains an example of a product from a productive group work task in a government class. The example is one of the products from the group; each student produced his or her own notes. In this case, students were reading a text about the importance of writing letters to elected officials. Each student took notes about the reading in the upper left quadrant of the conversation roundtable. Then, as each member of the group discussed the reading, the other members took notes in a corresponding quadrant. When the group completed its reading and discussion, each person wrote a single-sentence summary in the middle of the paper.

Figure 1.4. Conversational Roundtable

In a formative assessment system, the work students create during a productive group session serves as excellent fodder for checking understanding. The instructor reviews these work products against the lesson's purpose to determine which students need additional instruction (as will be described in the subsequent chapters of this book). For example, even a quick review of Eric's conversation roundtable suggests that he understands this content and that the group had a very interesting conversation while creating notes. Following this review, the teacher modeled his own search for his elected officials, examined the officials' perspectives on specific issues, and then chose a topic on which to write a letter to an elected official.

Independent Tasks (You do it alone)

The goal of education is to produce lifelong learners who can independently access and use information. Thus, each lesson must include opportunities for students to apply what they have learned on their own. Both in-class and out-of-class independent tasks provide students with opportunities to apply what they have learned.

The key to effective independent work lies in timing. Independent work should be used when students have demonstrated some level of success with content in the presence of their teacher and peers. Here's what doesn't work: homework assigned just after students have been introduced to content. If, for example, students were just introduced to methods for calculating the slope of a line or adding fractions, it is probably best not to assign homework on that content on the same day—because that homework is premature in this instructional cycle. It's not that homework is bad or evil; it's just that it must come when students are ready. In a formative assessment system, independent work allows for practice and application. It can also serve as a review for determining if students have grasped the prerequisite content or if additional instruction is necessary.

The components of a gradual release of responsibility model do not have to occur in a specific order to be effective. Take, for example, a lesson in which the teacher starts with students independently writing a journal entry in response to the question "How are we connected to our environment?" When the timer rings, the teacher has students work in triads to create a visual representation of their collective ideas. As part of this productive group work, each member of the group writes in a different color so the teacher can track each student's contributions. As the groups work, the teacher meets with small groups for guided instruction, asking questions and then prompting and cueing their responses. After meeting with several groups, the teacher identifies an area of need and gains students' attention. In this think-aloud, the teacher models his or her understanding of the word connected and the various ways that things can be connected, both physically and metaphorically. The teacher then establishes the purpose of the lesson and invites students to return to their groups and complete their charts, taking into account the additional information provided.

Again, the order of components is not important. What is important is that the teacher has an instructional framework that allows him or her to identify instructional needs, provide students with feedback, and plan appropriate instruction.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

We've introduced a system for formative assessment that provides teachers with a way to take action on student performance data. This system includes feed-up, feedback, and feed-forward, such that students understand a lesson's purpose and goal, are given information about their successes and needs, and experience high-quality instruction that closes the gap between what they know and can do and what is expected of them.

We do know that there is more information collected about students than ever before and that most of it is not used to make instructional decisions— probably because teachers spend too much time on student feedback and not enough time on feed-up and feed-forward. As we have noted, an exclusive focus on feedback is ineffective because it transfers the responsibility back to students exactly when they are struggling. Instead, we need an instructional framework that allows us to use performance data to make future instructional decisions. Our instructional framework, based on the gradual release of responsibility, provides an intentional way for teachers to increase student responsibility at appropriate times and reassume responsibility as needed.

In the next chapter, we turn our attention to the first part of the system— feed-up. We will explore the ways in which a lesson's purpose can be established and why a clearly communicated purpose is important. We will also investigate the role that motivation plays in student learning as well as how goal-setting can ensure that students become intrinsically motivated and exhibit internal regulation of their learning.

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Kudos

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Kudos to our girls volleyball coaches, Mike Jones, Alyssa Riggs, Kris Thomsen, Barb Berezowitz, Stacy Stoughton, Kailee Smith (Longoria), and teams who ended a great season this past week!
Kudos to Brad Ferstenou, Stephanie Rummler, and our Student Council/NJHS students for their help stuffing Easter eggs with the HS DRIVEN students this past week!
Kudos to Dustan Eckmann and all of our band students for a great Band-O-Rama performance this past week!
Kudos to Jeri Nettesheim, Wendy Zeman, and our Academic Bowl students who competed this past week and took 2nd place out of 7 school teams! Apart from competing as a team, first and second place individuals were recognized as well. Below are our students who placed!

First Place - Individual

Maddie Thompson - 6th grade ELA

Lee Gauger - 6th grade Math

Second Place - Individual

Ryan Dummer - 6th grade Social Studies

Evan Deans - 6th grade Science

Addie Rauch - 7th grade Social Studies

Nick Farvour - 7th grade Science

Charlie Beaudette - 7th grade Math

Connor Schmaling - 8th grade Science

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Information/Reminders...

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Fire Drill information:

Moving forward, as a district, due to some adjustments we would like to make in terms of safety and security all fire drills will be announced to all staff and students so that everyone is aware of the fire drill.

Applied Academic teachers... it is your week to make sure students email home to their parents/guardians via their email. Please provide them with a stem starter and thought as to what they can email home about from the past 5 weeks of class.
Reminder: All staff should be emailing parents/guardians a minimum of every other week to inform our families about what will be coming up in your classes.
The parent blog is updated on our website.
The Science/Social Studies storage room has been moved down the hall to room 102. The cores of the new ELA and Science/Social Studies storage rooms have been changed so access should not be a problem!
Monday, March 12-14 - Extended Advisory for Huddle Time.

Huddle time is designed to conference with each student in your advisory to look over their Skyward information and assist with keeping them on track and to set goals/items of need to complete or discuss with their teachers prior to Spring Break.

Monday, March 12 - Special education aide meeting from 2:40 - 3:00 in the conference room.
Monday, March 12 - Secondary Curriculum Committee Meeting from 3:30 - 5:00 in the Karcher library.
Tuesday, March 13 - Sing-a-bration @ 7:00pm @ BHS gym
Wednesday, March 14 - Information on the Nation wide student walkout... below is the email shared this past week. Please let Ryan or I know if you have any questions.

Staff,

I want to give you some information specific to our school, and I know our district will also be sending you some information, as well as, they sent out a letter to parents/guardians.

I'm sure you are hearing about the coordinated effort, #Enough! and Womens March National School Walk-Out, which is scheduled to take place at 10:00 AM on March 14th. Officially, I have not seen our school signed up on the social media post to participate. However, I have been made aware that we have students that will want to participate as I have been asked questions by a number students and parents. Hopefully, families are having serious conversations about how they are grieving and what type of response is best for the situation and the country.

This is not a district or school sponsored event. This is a student-led civic engagement effort and I will be speaking with students who have reached out to me tomorrow, Friday, to ensure that their engagment is done in a safe and respectful manner. If students quietly and peacefully, walk out at 10:00 and remain out for 17 minutes, 1 minute for each of the victims in the recent high school tragedy, and then return to their classes promptly, I think it is in our best interest to not try to stop their actions. This could interrupt the instructional day. Politely ask them if they walk to please stay in the building suggesting the library or our interior courtyard as the safest place for them to be. Students who have interest in leaving school grounds will need to have parent permission as they would any other time they are leaving our campus.

As a staff member, you are expected to keep teaching and delivering your instruction. I ask that you also help our students understand that with any social action there are two sides and we have to be respectful to each other. Remember, some students will not walk out and that is their right too.

The walk-out time falls during 7th grade academic time (3rd hour) and 8th grade elective time (3rd hour). Ryan and myself will be monitoring the walk-out, but I am asking, especially during this day, that you make your presence in the halls and be alert for anyone that chooses to make poor decisions on how they behave. Students will be expected to be on time for their 4th period class so please make sure you take accurate attendance at the start of 3rd hour and at the start of 4th period so we know that students are back.

If you have any questions, please ask.

Wednesday, March 14 - Some of our 8th grade students will be participating in the High School Reality Fair and will miss a portion of their school day. Any questions, please contact Amanda Thate.
Wednesday, March 14 - iTime PLC in the library.

Please use the winter MAP data to help determine your next rotations, which starts on April 3.

March 16 - Last day for staff to use your 2017-2018 classroom budget money. Below is the email regarding this from Ruth Schenning, Business Manager:

Hi, All -

Just a reminder that the cutoff date to submit requisitions for 2017-18 purchases is March 16. Most ordering should already be complete, but I do recognize that there are a few exceptions where this is not possible (such as food purchases, field trips, conferences, prom, etc). The expectation is that you anticipate your needs through the end of the year and submit any necessary requests for materials, conferences, services or events by March 16.

A few more reminders follow. These apply to budgeted accounts, fundraising accounts, and to student activity fund accounts.
1. Individuals are not to place orders directly with vendors. An approved purchase order is the means by which orders are placed.
2. Individuals should not purchase items on their own and request reimbursement unless arrangements to do so are made with your supervisor prior to making the purchase. The purchase order process should be used to order items, not to reimburse individuals after the fact. This assures that purchases are appropriately approved and eliminates the risk that an individual may not be reimbursed.
3. Sales tax will not be reimbursed as the district is a tax-exempt entity (paying sales tax would be an unnecessary cost to the district).
Thank you,

Ruth

Looking ahead:

Monday, March 19 - NJHS induction ceremony @ 6:30pm in the Karcher auditorium.
Monday, March 19 - Lift-a-thon fundraiser from 2:30 - 4:00.
March 26 - March 30 - Spring Break!!!

Pictures from this past week!

Students in 8th grade iTime participating in literature circles or math! Great job to everyone for holding to our iTime focus!